Small black fine line lettering reading don't panic on the upper arm, with a green knit sleeve pushed up above it.

Don't panic lettering on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of small black lettering reading don't panic in a lowercase typewriter-style font on the outer upper arm. The linework is crisp and even with solid black ink and no visible shading. The background is a soft, blurred indoor room with a green knit sleeve at the top left and the tattoo sitting in the centre of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Upper arm Text Phrase Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old black machine in the Harbourside ferry office had three keys that stuck, so by the spring of 1962 the clerks had learned to hit the e twice and hope for the best. On the morning the Stormcock was due in from the Skerries, Gwen typed the sailing notice on a card and pinned it by the door. Halfway through she ran short of capitals and didn't want to ask anyone for more ink, so the card ended up reading don't panic in small, plain letters, the apostrophe sitting a little too high like a raised eyebrow.

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Nobody had asked for that. Captain Hobday read it twice with his cap pushed back, then walked out to the mooring and told the men the weather was turning, which it was. The fog came over the Sound by noon, thick enough to swallow the bell buoy, and a deckhand called Terry Lowe, who had never once been past the breakwater, stood in the wheelhouse doorway looking as though someone had told him the sea was about to be rude.

Gwen went down with a flask and found him there. She did not say much. She had a theory that a sentence on a card was like a hand on a rope: it did nothing for the wind, but it gave the fingers something to hold. "Count the blasts," she said. "Two long, every minute. Hobday does the rest."

The Stormcock came in at teatime with the fog still clinging to her like wet wool, and the boy was first ashore with the mooring line. Gwen kept the card. It stayed by the door for years, faded to the colour of weak tea, the e's gone soft, and new clerks would ask who had typed it. She always said it was the only useful thing the office ever sent out to sea.